Eating disorders. Money. Sex addiction. You may wonder what links these three things, but they have more in common than you might think. Listen in as Amalia chats to therapist Heather Lowrey about scarcity mindsets, self-worth, money as a means of control, and the importance of not comparing yourself to others. If you enjoy listening, be sure to follow us so you're the first to know when we add new episodes. While you're there, please leave us a review — we’d really appreciate it.
Amalia chats to therapist Heather Lowrey about scarcity mindsets, self-worth, money as a means of control, and the importance of not comparing yourself to others.
Amalia: [00:00:00] You know, I think sometimes our world is moving so fast that we don't think about how new some of these things are. Right. And I, like the fact that a woman couldn't have a bank account or a credit card in her own name until just like what, 1970s was when women could like have access to money of their own.
Heather: And then you get like a generation coming from the 80s who does have access to that, but there hasn't ever been a conversation about money. And so there was definitely like no education. That lack of education and access is really the foundation of the problems.
Amalia: That's Heather Lowry. She's a therapist who relocated from Seattle to Texas during the pandemic and who specializes in financial stress, relationships, and yes, sex addiction. When Heather began her practice, she realized those three things had an unexpected link. She always makes me feel like I'm not alone. My experiences actually aren't that unique and different. That I am part of a time in the world where we have different relationships with money and food than our mothers and grandmothers probably had.
I wanted to talk to Heather because I think I was at a place in my life where I was realizing body shame and body issues I've had since I was a really young kid. And my relationship with money, whether it's scarcity or indulgence, were really connected. And I had never had that thought before. And to meet this professional woman who specializes in helping people navigate that was really interesting to me. And I wanted to dive deeper into what that looked like.
Heather: I was doing a presentation and I like to be a little saucy. And so I was like, I think I'm going to do this on sex addiction. That sounds fun. I saw all of the parallels to eating disorders. And so I did, again, never had an interest in that, but because of what I knew about eating disorders, I was like, this is the same thing. It's just using sex or relationships or another person in the way that somebody uses food. Again, it wasn't my intention at all to even weave money into it, but in learning more about, you know, using kind of eating disorders as a form of emotional regulation, sex and relationships as a form of emotional regulation, it was a very easy way to go down the line of realizing. Because obviously we all know that we use money that way.
Amalia: When it came to pinpointing what exactly was the root of all those points of stress, Heather had an epiphany.
Heather: Scarcity of mindset is like an inherent fear of losing something, not having enough, not deserving something, keeping us from achieving goals and moving forward. And also many times that can create some compulsive behaviors on the other end.
Amalia: [00:03:00] I'm Amalia Martino, and like a lot of people, I also have learned to understand what scarcity mindset looks like, where it shows up in my life, and you know, how to tackle it. That's why I started this podcast. It's a place where we speak frankly about getting what you want and more out of life because we all deserve more than just one slice. Welcome to the Whole Damn Pie.
Let's be honest. We've all been in those situations throughout life where we've had to make a decision and settled for the safer option. As long as it quote-on-quote looked good on paper or rather there aren't any obvious red flags. People are more than happy to stay in a place that isn't necessarily bad but isn't great either. That's what Heather felt when she finally decided that good on paper wasn't going to be good enough in her life anymore.
Heather: I always wanted to do psychology. I always had wanted to be a therapist, but I picked economics and accounting because it felt safe. It felt like something that would be good, you know, that was a good title for like a college graduate black women. There was a lot of what I recognize what I call good on paper syndrome that was informing a lot of those decisions. When I went back to grad school, it was with the intention of never looking at a spreadsheet again. It was to get out of the accounting field. I didn't have kind of an interest in personal finance or anything like that. You know, I was wanting to do counseling and it's something that I've been bringing up with a lot of people on my counseling side is like being able to understand decisions being made more from the is this something I want to do or is this something that looks good on paper?
Amalia: I'm a mom of a now adult, I call her a baby adult, daughter. And watching her make decisions about what's good on paper and what feels good really has me reflecting on my own life track. So much of life is simply an experience. You have to go through it. And as my child begins her adult life, I feel like I'm on a parallel path of self-discovery with an empty nest. So when I listen to Heather talk about the through line of food, money, sex, and relationships, I realize I also need to figure out what feels good for me moving forward. And I really wanted to know how Heather reached the realization as well.
Heather: My goal when I was as a new therapist, I always wanted to work with eating disorders. And so in the work that I've done with eating disorders, I also was doing, I was on a marriage and family therapy track. So learning about marriage and family. And I randomly read an article about sex addiction. I use the term like sex and love addiction because that is like, basically like that's the common nomenclature for behaviors. It's really more of like any what we consider problematic or compulsive behavior, um, about with relationships, sometimes sex. So we think of like the kind of serial dater or if there's like having more, kind of casual hookups than somebody wants. And that's, I think the caveat I always like to make is like, it's not about the stigmatizing of sexual behaviors. It's more about when is something not working for us? And so it's not that if you know somebody, you know, hooks up after meeting somebody at a bar, that's not inherently problematic. It becomes problematic if there's been consequences as a result. somebody doesn't really want, they don't really want to do it. They're in a committed relationship and so later on they feel terrible because they haven't lived up to their value system. So it's more of like when we're using, um, again, a sexual behavior, a relationship, another person to kind of soothe an emotional need.
Amalia: Heather says that those emotional needs can even extend their reach into someone's relationship with food.
Heather: So in the same way of like eating a certain food as a way to treat or punish yourself, a way of restricting ourselves for, you know, as a punishment of food. A way of basically continuing to do things despite like the negative consequences is, again, I noticed so many of the similarities between how people would manage their relationship with food and the way they would manage their interpersonal relationships. Like one common one that I would see is like the pursuit of a romantic relationship with chronically emotionally unavailable people. So, an example common is like the person who is dating somebody who's already in a committed relationship is probably the closest one. So that desire to want a relationship, but I keep picking people where there's absolutely no chance that there can be a relationship. And being able to understand the underlying fears attached to that. So the desire for commitment, but not picking people who are able to give that to us. And what are the after effects of that? Money is very cut and dry, you know, dollars and cents. It's just all math, but we know that money is very emotional.
Amalia: Money is control. So I'm either controlling it, or it's controlling me. I wasn't as aware when I was growing up about the role money plays in women's lives. From women being afraid to negotiate salary packages at work to not even being aware of their own home finances, I realized that women were at a systematic disadvantage. I wanted to see what Heather had seen of this in her own practice.
Heather: Yeah, and I was also doing a little bit of like kind of just like additional research for today and learned a few things that were infuriating, honestly, about the role of money with women and then especially with like women of color because of the lack of education and lack of access is what I've seen as like the common threat to where a lot of the avoidance comes from. And then especially like when you add like being a person of color because there was like legitimate legal lack of access to some of this information.
Amalia: I remember being young and like my grandma getting access to like a credit card with her name on it. In retrospect, probably for the first time and like having it mailed to like my aunt's house because my grandpa couldn't see them. But like, it was just like this big thing, but to think like that was the first time she probably ever had access to her own money. And that's not that long ago.
Heather: That memory makes me realize just how big of a deal that was and that for the first time, my grandmother had access to her own money, but that's how money has been used as control. And unfortunately, the level of control we have over our own money can appear in other aspects of our lives in unhealthy ways. They come in line together all of the time, very frequently dealing with eating disorders. So for instance, something like binge eating, people will recognize something's going on because of the amount of money that's being spent on food. So there can be like looking at a budget and realizing, Oh my gosh, I spent $800 eating out this month.In the moment, not recognizing it because the focus is maybe more on managing the emotions attached to the binge. But then again, reality hits when you look at the bank statement and realize, oh my gosh, like this actually is a problem for me that can come up with any of the love and sex addiction. There can be compulsive gift-giving to maybe try to keep the other person involved, spending a lot of money on the self, not because you want to, but because you need to look perfect in order to attract a partner or your desirability being kind of attached to who wants you sexually. So there is this underlying layer of how money is used, even with those two other specialties that initially felt so different, but it's pretty much just like a whack-a-mole. You kind of look at one of them and then you can see how the tentacles have gotten into their relationship with something else.
Amalia: Let's dive into scarcity mindset a little bit, because I think that is something that can be inherited from, you know, growing up and youth or whatever it is. But can you, first of all, tell us what that is and how it appears?
Heather: I actually use the analogy a lot when we think about what the diet cycle is for people. The idea of starting a diet and what tends to come up for people—usually when somebody is starting a plan, it's coming from a place of guilt, shame, not feeling good enough. Usually, that becomes the impetus when somebody decides that they want to lose weight. The decision itself gives a high because of that hope of, "Oh, this is what it's going to be like. I'm going to do this and I'm going to do this meal planning and prep and then I'm going to lose weight." Whatever the cascade is. So the high of that starts just with the fantasy of what's going to happen with this diet. Then a couple of gains start—noticing body changes, noticing somebody commenting on your appearance. All those little things. It becomes like a honeymoon period, which can cycle a little bit. The honeymoon period increases motivation, so maybe seeing a few more results, having another honeymoon period, but eventually there are diminishing returns. We all know that weight plateaus after a certain point. We know that eventually you're going to get tired of eating the same type of thing, so you don't get the same gains anymore. Sometimes that can make people dig deeper, but eventually, you hit a wall. You're not getting the high anymore. Maybe you're not getting comments or noticing your body change in the way you want to. You are going out with your friends and you're tired of always getting the chicken broth when everyone else is getting a full meal. Then you kind of hit the wall and then you get the effects. That becomes a cycle.
The way that can play out again back to money and the scarcity mindset is deciding for a budget. When people decide they want to do a budget, it's typically coming from a place of guilt, shame, or comparison. A budget's great, but it's being mindful of our impetus—what's making us do it. Anything that we're starting from coming from a place of guilt or shame is not good. It's going to impact even if what we're doing is potentially helpful if we're doing it from a place of shame. That is like a very dark lens that's going to really cover the success. What I hope to do with some of the consulting and coaching that I do is for those things to actually not create a honeymoon period because we're not numbers. We're not dollar signs. Your self-worth isn't attached to what your budget is, or what your debt is. Instead, we want to have a plan, but not make it so connected to who we are as a person and our identity because shame just begets more shame.
Amalia: But how do we do this from a practical standpoint? Once you're in it, it's hard to get out of it, and it's hard to even see a light at the end of the tunnel. Part of me thinks it's by design. We have all of these debt instruments that just keep us tethered deeper and deeper into debt. So I get the point that shame begets more shame, and I really want you to hear that. But if you're in it, how do we even do this from a practical standpoint?
Heather: One of the exercises I do with—I mean, actually, I've done it on the therapeutic side, but that I do with my coaching clients—is we do a look-back period. We do maybe seven days, sometimes 30 days, a look-back of their spending—no judgment, no changing or not including something. It's just getting a snapshot of what the last month has looked like for you. Some of it is making us look—literally look at our money. I know plenty of people who don't open their bank statements or never log on.
Amalia: Raise your hand if you've ever wanted to ignore your bank statement after a fun weekend, or if you had a cheat day with tracking the calories in your food during the same weekend. Yeah, me too. I know it's not just me who's fallen into this trap of out of sight, out of mind.
Heather: So in doing that look-back period, allowing people to kind of sit with and confront any of the guilt or shame that comes from what those numbers are. We want change in behavior to come from insight and growth, not from guilt or shame because it's not sustained.
Amalia: And guilt or shame could be around the amount you spent or what you spent. We're talking about scarcity mindset, but then I imagine this could also be on the other end of, "Oh my God, I spent that much money on this."
Heather: Or the scarcity mindset leading to overspending in other areas. So being scarce and kind of the idea of dieting and then eventually it's too restrictive and you say "F it" and then splurge. If something feels too restrictive, we feel like we failed at it. It feels out of control. So it's like, "What's the point? I have X number in student loans or I have X number in credit card debt. So okay, I might as well go to Sephora and spend $300." That's because of the way that how much money we have or don't have is connected to our identity and feelings of self.
Amalia: Maybe for someone who's just starting to think about this, how do we begin to view our relationship with money to avoid guilt and self-doubt? Because there's one thing to have a scarcity mindset where we're operating in this scarcity place. There's another thing to start or maybe not start—maybe there's another thing to have abundance, not need for anything and maybe just have the luxury of wanting for things. I think it's similar to what you were talking about with food actually, right? Like you hit this place and you start to plateau and then, you know, you've had these dreams of having X, Y, and Z and earning X, Y, and Z and then you get X, Y, and Z. And now what?
Heather: So really challenging the avoidance. Even when it doesn't feel good. It feels worse when you don't know what's happening. And that also means it doesn't mean checking your bank balance every day because then, again, that can create fixation. Too much of a fixation can then lead to avoidance. But it can be once a week, it could be twice a month, it could be right after whatever somebody's payday is, but it's setting time aside to just kind of see where you are. Again, not because you're setting a value based on what that number is, but if anything, you're taking away what that number means. This is just my money. This is what it is. It's not me being a success. It's not me being a failure. It's not me being worse than so-and-so. It's just trying to neutralize it.
Amalia: Listen, this is all overwhelming, and if you feel that your self-worth is tied up in how much money you have, just know you're not alone. Heather suggests that if you're feeling that way, you should take the time to be kind to yourself.
Heather: Compassion is one of the first things I feel like it's important to learn when people are examining their relationship with money and honestly with food and relationships as well. The compassion to understand that some of the choices that we've made, we've made based on our situation at that time, our education at that time, our personal development at that time. Being kind of 35 and berating the financial decisions that we made at 22 just isn't helpful. At 35, somebody's going to have a better understanding of, let's say, debt or buying a car new at 22 versus, you know, a 35-year-old might consider buying some of those little things. So it's having compassion if we feel like we have made mistakes—quote-unquote mistakes. Because again, going forward from a place of, "I messed this up. I'm bad with money," just does not allow for growth. We want to have an understanding of maybe why we did something, but not beating ourselves up for it because it just doesn't help. Self-worth being attached to money is tied very much to a lot of people. Number one, hear those direct things and we have a society and a culture that says that having the financial means makes you more worthy for things. So if that's something that we're seeing on a national, cultural, social level, then add to it little family nuances and family dynamics, and it's just a no-brainer. Same with the thinness ideal. We're seeing that just socially and culturally, but you add a certain family dynamic, and it's like, of course, somebody is going to think that they have more value when they're a lower weight. It takes literal counter-programming to change the mindset that our self-worth is not attached to what we have.
Amalia: What we look like. Wow. That is so true. You know, one thing you said struck me: we do live in a country that assigns value to those things and also perpetuates this falsehood that we are all equally given the same opportunities. It's just how you picked yourself up by your bootstraps and achieved those things that result in that appearance, those things, or this status. And I think that's so false. For me, it's absolutely ludicrous, but I will admit that it took until I was in my 30s—God, was that my 30s? I think it was in my 30s—when someone I went to high school with mentioned that they, you know, I was feeling very much like, "God, I'm so behind. I'm not married, I don't own a house," all of these indicators of success in your mid-thirties, right? And somebody had divulged that it's someone who I was like, "God, you own four houses, you have three rentals, you live in what, like, how does this even," right? Like, I was just in that place where I'm like, if someone could explain this to me, maybe I can figure out how to do it. And it came that, well, they inherited $150,000 from their grandparents when they turned 18. And I went to have, and I was like, "Well, what the what?"
Heather: First of all, what?
Amalia: And, you know, I went to a very affluent high school, and I'm sure that was true for most of my classmates, right? They had intergenerational wealth. They had parents to help. They had money to put down. They had these inheritances. And this whole time I had spent like, what, 15 years trying to figure out what was wrong with me that I couldn't achieve these things that all of these classmates could achieve. And in retrospect, you know, they had intergenerational wealth. They had parents to help. They had money to put down. They had these inheritances.
Heather: And maybe not having the same obligations. For instance, our parents' generation, very few people came out with student loans outside of, you know, a graduate or doctoral degree. But now, 60-something percent of people have, if not more, come out with student loans, and those loans are at least $20,000 or more. And that's low from what I hear, $20,000. So, not only is there not the intergenerational wealth or family assistance, but you're coming out of school at a deficit. That's a double bind—no wealth, and then you have a $500-a-month student loan bill. Another thing that disproportionately affects women and people of color is that the types of majors and degrees we pursue lend themselves to less lucrative jobs. We know that women and minorities aren't necessarily steered towards STEM fields. There is a lot of focus on social work, education, or communication—those types of fields. And those fields can be really hard to earn a living in right out of undergrad. Then you have student loans coming due six months later. There's a whole generation of people who started behind the eight ball.
Amalia: I want to talk a little bit more about women of color and how we are taught to think about our relationship with money. How does it affect other aspects of our lives? And I don't know if I'm trying to draw a line that doesn't exist, but the fact that your work with eating disorders was mostly with Caucasian patients—maybe people who struggle in that space—does that show up differently for women of color?
Heather: Yeah, I mean, the reason I had so few Black clients isn't because Black women aren't experiencing eating disorders. There's, again, a cultural stigma that within a lot of minority communities, therapy is something people just don't do. Like, I definitely got some pushback when I went back to school to do something like this. It was, "We work this out in the family. You don't tell family business. Go talk about it at church or with those groups." So, that's something that can be really common within minority communities, just overall not attending to our mental health. And honestly, physical health too. Some of it is just not presenting. There can be a devaluation of certain behaviors. For example, somebody might be binging, but if there are cultural implications like, "You need to clear your plate. Whatever's put in front of you, you need to finish that or don't be rude. So-and-so cooked that for you, you need to eat all of that," it can lead to compensatory behaviors coming from food being forced upon us. Food is a love language in many families. There can be pressure to eat, even when we don't want to. That can contribute to the use of purging, overexercise, or diet pills because of a challenge with asserting that we don't want to eat something. There's also just the fact that Black or brown people are underdiagnosed. If we're in general, like, you can go to a doctor with something and there's a difference in the way a Black woman is diagnosed compared to a white woman. I think there’s also some bias that impacts people knowing whether or not their eating disorder behaviors actually warrant treatment. For instance, there's still the myth that you have to be at a low body weight to have an eating disorder. If someone is presenting at an average or slightly above-average body weight or BMI, they're less likely to be considered as having an eating disorder, even if all their symptomology shows that it is.
Amalia: Because the eating disorder isn't the result. It's not the number on the scale; it's the behavior. I mean,
Heather: The number on the scale is important if somebody's at a low weight due to malnourishment. That number is important. But typically, unless somebody is at that malnourished state, it takes a lot of convincing for people to acknowledge eating disorders in those with average weight or overweight. There's still bulimia, there's still anorexia. Anorexia doesn't inherently mean someone has to be at a very low weight. I think also some of the myths about eating disorders contribute to why people of color are not getting as much help. Certain body compositions, like those that are less likely to be very thin, are often not recognized as indicative of an eating disorder. But I do think, again, that the idea of self-worth being attached to body image plays a role as well. I weave them in and out because I know how similar they are.
Amalia: I think that's okay. And I think it's good that we weave them together because they are attached whether we want them to be or not, right?
Heather: I remember reading Suze Orman right out of college and thinking, "I don't know anything she's talking about." None of it applied to me. Suze Orman, when I was 24 out of school, was talking to a 55-year-old white woman about taking control of their money. Certain things just did not apply as a young person. So, again, some assumptions about not coming out with debt—what if someone has to help support a family member or is a caregiver? Maybe some of their income is going out, maybe without their intention, but that's what it is. It creates such perfect situations to achieve financial success and there's just not room for concessions. People are set up with plans that weren't made for them and then beat themselves up when they fail. The thing I want to reiterate is that as people start on a path to be more financially aware, having moments of guilt and self-compassion, and challenging comparisons to others is crucial. People start at vastly different places and everyone's track has different hills. When we compare too much one-to-one, it's easy to feel discouraged, especially if people have made financial mistakes in the past. It's about having compassion for past decisions, learning from them, and moving forward. It's like learning from a decision made in the past but not assuming it defines us or means we can't do something different in the future.
Amalia: It also makes it, you know, it's part of the life that you have to experience. We can know all these things and we can read all the books and listen to all the podcasts, but these things—like scarcity mindset and challenges of self-worth depending on what you ate or what you look like or how much money you have in the bank—don't go away even if this number on the scale gets smaller and the number in your bank account gets bigger. These are root issues to the human experience, especially for women, and I think you just get to learn to recognize them and then move on. And that's the thing about the whole damn pie: you don't have to have all the answers. You get to learn as you go and build community along the way.